64 Chapter Three The Development of the Experimental Band 65

I would go there to play with my cousins, and I began to learn the names it, then talk about it, and you'd write a little paper on it. This was music of these people- Lester Young, Charlie Parker, James Moody, Nat "King" history, but it was never really appealing. It was nice, but it was so much Cole, Miles Davis. They would be playing this music every time I went nicer to be in the band room hearing that live stuff. there, but I didn't know the name of the music; it was just pretty music. I knew all the singers- the popular music, but I was more drawn to this Mitchell characterizes those who went to DuSable during the Dyett era other music because you just listened, and what you heard was inside as "fortunate," but even Englewood, where he went to high school, had its rather than words and rhythms that they would suggest through the advantages. He began playing baritone saxophone in the high-school band, popular forms. and borrowed an alto saxophone from another student. Jazz was not taught at Englewood, but getting to know the precocious saxophonist Donald In the mid-1950s, Mitchell's family moved briefly to Milwaukee, where "Hippmo" Myrick, who later became associated with both Philip Cobran he started high school and began playing the clarinet. His brother Norman and Earth, Wind, and Fire, made up for that lack. "He kind of took me came to live with the family, bringing along a collection of 78 rpm jazz re­ under his wing, because he already knew the stuff," said Mitchell. "He was cordings-"'killers,' they used to call them. Louis Armstrong,].]. Johnson. a fully accomplished musician in high school." Billy Taylor was very popular back then. Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins." The historian Robin D. G. Kelley has raised the possibility that some fu­ As with Jarman, this strange new·music exercised a peculiar power over ture AACM members were radicalized in part by the challenges of military Mitchell. "For me that was a weird time," Mitchell recalled, 'because after life-not only combat, but also the racism that was endemic to service in I started listening to jazz I didn't want to listen to anything else any more. the U.S. armed forces. 38 In 1955, in his junior year in high school, Jarman There was a certain coolness that went along with that-you understood dropped out and joined the army. "I went into the Airborne school, and the jazz, that made you cooler. After a while I went back to include all those Ranger school, because you could make extra money. I made it through other musics I had grown up with." basic training and jump school as number two, because they wouldn't ac­ Entering DuSable High School, Jarman was drawn to Captain Dyett's cept a black as number one." The army was where Jarman started to play band. His parents could not afford to buy him a trumpet, Jarman's preferred the alto saxophone: "I got out of 'the line'-the death zone-by transfer­ instrument, so he joined the band as a snare drummer. 'All you needed ring to the band. The first saxophone I had was a plastic one, like Ornette was a drum pad and drumsticks, which cost about six dollars. The drum I Coleman. The bandmaster gave me thirty days to get my act together or played belonged to the school, and I couldn't take it home." Another future he would kick me back into the line. In that band were a lot of people who AACM member living nearby, James Johnson, played bassoon in the Dyett helped me to get my act together." band. Johnson and Jarman would practice together, eventually developing a Mitchell joined the army in 1958. Army musicians had plenty of time unique daily schooltime lunch ritual: "We would go across the street every to practice and exchange information, and Mitchell met a number of saxo­ day, usually without very much lunch money, maybe fifty cents a day. We phonists, such as Nathaniel Davis, as well as fellow Chicagoans Ruben Coo­ refused to eat in the lunchroom. We would go across the street and put per and Lucious White, Jarman's neighbor as a young person. Mitchell also a nickel apiece in the jukebox. We could hear three songs for a dime. We came into contact with Palmer Jenkins, Sergeant Mitchell, William Romero, would always play this one song by James Moody, 'Last Train from Over­ and Joseph Stevenson, "who was incredible on the saxophone. He was a brook.' We would play that every day." In addition to performance classes, great influence on Anthony [Braxton] when Anthony was in the army." the school's version of music history recalled Abrams's 1940s grammar Mitchell was eventually transferred to Heidelberg, Germany, where he fre­ school experiences: quented local jam sessions at places like the well-known Cave 54, where pia­ nist Karl Berger, trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, saxophonist Bent Jaedig They'd show these films of white operas and white orchestras, like and other European and American musicians met and performed together. Mozart's music- Mozart was real big- Beethoven's music, and Brahms. Hard bop was the coin of that realm, although Ornette Coleman's music That would be a part of our musical education. The teacher would show was beginning to make an impression. During this time, Mitchell met saxo- 66 Chapter Three The Development of the Expe rim enta l Band 67

phonist Albert Ayler, who was in a different army band, stationed in France. eluded Malachi Favors and saxophonists john Powell, Anthony Braxton, After duty hours, Mitchell would go to sessions and listen to Ayler: and Henry Threadgill, as well as Richard Brown, who was playing piano and clarinet, rather than the saxophone for which he became known years I didn't really know what he was doing, but I did know, because I was a later under his adopted name of Ari. Friday afternoons were devoted to re­ saxophonist, that he had an enormous sound on the instrument. They hearsals that brought Wilson students together with the cream of Chicago's would have these sessions, and everybody was, you know, talking about musicians. Present at these events were people like Eddie Harris, Charles him behind his back, but one time they played a blues. Albert played the Stepney, drummers Steve McCall and Jack Dejohnette, bassists Betty Du­ blues about three choruses straight. After that he started stretching, and pree and Jimmy Willis, pianist Andrew Hill, and several musicians who had something went off in my head-"Oh, I see what he's doing now." It been part of the Sun Ra Arkestra, including trumpeter Hobart Dotson and made an impression on me. percussionists Richard Evans and Jim Herndon. In the meantime, Jarman, Favors, Threadgill, pianist Louis Hall, and drummer Richard Smith (now In August 1958, Jarman was discharged. "It was not something I wanted Drahseer Khalid) had formed their own group, playing hard bop. to continue," Jarman said, "because it was very anti-human, this attitude One day in 1963, Roscoe Mitchell turned up at a rehearsal of the Experi­ they were making people into. "39 After a brief visit home to Chicago, he ex­ mental Band at the C&C Lounge, and met Richard Abrams, who had been perienced a kind of odyssey: "I went wandering around the United States. I introduced to the saxophonist by pianist-drummer Jack Dejohnette.4 2 Mala­ went to Arizona. My aunt was there. I stayed there for eight months or so. chi Favors, an early member of the rehearsal band, remarked to Abrams I couldn't talk during this period; I was mute. I went to the Milwaukee In­ how impressed he was by Mitchell's playing. "Muhal kind of took me in," stitute of Psychiatric Research in Wisconsin, as an outpatient, and enrolled Mitchell recalled. Td go to school, and I'd go straight from school to Mu­ in the Milwaukee Institute of Technology. They got me to be able to talk hal's, when he was living in that little place off Cottage Grove, down in the again, and I haven't shut my mouth since."40 basement. I remember he had painted everything that velvet purple color. After his discharge from the army, Mitchell felt that "it was pretty much Sometimes I'd be down over to Muhal's at ten, eleven, twelve at night, play­ set that I was going to be a musician." With the support of his father, who ing or working on music." offered to provide him with a place to stay, he decided to use his GI Bill funds Soon, Mitchell and Favors began rehearsing together and developing to go to Chicago's Woodrow Wilson junior College in 1961, where he met new compositions, often with two other young experimentalists, trum­ Jarman for the first time. "Jarman was already into a contemporary-type peter Fred Berry and drummer Alvin Fielder. Fielder was becoming aware bag when I met him. He was always a little bit out there, all the time." The that "there comes a point where you go from a notion of swinging and two musicians studied with Richard Wang, who was, according to Jarman, keeping a pulse to a notion of time being something different . ... Sun Ra "very adventurous as far as 'jazz' music was concerned, as well as 'classical' had always told me, 'Al, loosen up,' I didn't know what he meant, really." 43 music." According to Wang himself, who has to be credited along with the Looking for something different, Fielder visited New York for nearly a year redoubtable Walter Dyett in any history of the early AACM members, in in 1962, but somehow, the music being played by what he remembered as addition to the standard lessons in theory, counterpoint, and keyboard har­ a "clique" of musicians from Boston, Detroit, and Chicago was not satisfy­ mony, the young musicians were exposed to the music of the Second Vien­ ing his growing urge to find another path. "I first started to loosen up after nese School, as well as john Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.41 The standard meeting Muhal," Fielder said. Abrams was performing in a trio with Rafael texts included Paul Hindemith's classic 1946 Elementary Training for Musi­ Garrett and Steve McCall. Fielder replaced the peripatetic McCall, and be­ cians, which later became an aspect of AACM autodidacticism. Other texts gan to meet musicians from a younger circle of experimentalists. "The first included Hindemith's 1945 The Craft of Musical Composition and composer time I played in a so-called free group was with Roscoe," Fielder noted. 44 Arnold Schoenberg's 1951 Style and Idea. As he told writer Ted Panken, "Roscoe Mitchell came to a rehearsal I was Wang's students, who performed in jazz and classical ensembles, in- doing with Muhal, Kalaparusha [Maurice Mcintyre] and [trombonist and 68 Chapter Thr ee bassist] Lester Lashley. He just sat and listened, and asked me could I play free [laughs]. I said, 'Yeah, I play free,' So he invited me to a rehearsal with Freddie Berry and Malachi Favors. That's how the original Roscoe Mitchell Quartet started."45 "The first compositions we played in Roscoe's group were very much like Ornette's music," Fielder recalled. "I developed a philosophy there that I wanted to play my bebop as loose as possible and I wanted to play my free music as tight as possible."46 Up to that point, Fielder had been play­ ing around town with musicians like saxophonists Cozy Eggleston and Earl Ezell (later Ahmad Salaheldeen), and pianist Danny Riperton, the brother of singer Minnie Riperton. Now, he was in the process of crossing a per­ sonal, conceptual, and professional Rubicon, with a very different kind of music. Discovering at first hand the social dynamics of the "Inside/Out­ side" binary, Fielder noticed that "None of the bebop cats would call me any more, once I started working with Muhal and Roscoe." 47 Meanwhile, Mitchell was trying to get his friend Joseph Jarman to come down and play with the Experimental Band. As Jarman tells it,

Roscoe said, you oughta come, there's this guy who's got a rehearsal band down here. He's a nice guy and he knows a lot about music. So I went down there and there was this guy, and he greets you like you were his brother or something. He said, welcome, and there were all these people in there, and I had to step back, because some of them were like famous people-local Chicago musicians, Jack DeJohnette, Scotty Holt, Steve McCall. And then this guy gave me an invitation whenever I felt like it to come by his house and get music lessons. He'd offer you herb tea and it would be so good,'' Jarman recalled. "He was into herbology, astrology, painting, all this mystical stuff that I had dreamed of. It was like I had found a teacher.

After daily classes with the dedicated, expansive Wang, the young musi­ cians would join the nightly throng at Peggy and Richard Abrams's tiny basement apartment on South Evans, where they would explore musical, cultural, political, social, and spiritual ideas. Abrams's range of experiences and interests deeply affected the young musicians. "Muhal's place would always stay packed with people," said Mitchell. "He'd have all this time for all these people, and still at the end of the week he'd come to the band with a big-band chart." 73 72 Chapter Three The Development of the Experimental Band

3 drove a Chicago Transit Authority bus to ensure a living. 5 Around 1963 or have a lot of money. A new Cadillac every year, new clothes, fabulous 1964, Gene Dinwiddie took Robinson to the Experimental Band. As Robin­ clothes. These were just gamblers, they didn't really deal in violent son tells it, crime or extortion.

We were reading charts. I liked that. We were just rehearsing, we weren't During these highly singular field trips, music served as a kind of baby­ playing anywhere. I think it was every Monday or Tuesday evening, just sitter. "He would give us money to put in the jukebox," recalled Threadgill. reading Richard's charts, or you could bring some charts in yourself. He "It would be all jazz on the jukebox, because my father loved jazz, and he started giving me some ideas for writing some charts. Me and about knew all those people, Basie and all of them. He would go to Mexico and three other people came down with charts, and he liked mine. He said, Spain with them on vacation and stuff." Threadgill's father also had records "Troy, you need to come over. " I went over to his house, and that's when at home: "I used to go to my father's house and just stay for the weekend, I started learning different methods of composition, and started writing and just play records. Duke, Gene Ammons, Count Basie, Modern Jazz more. Then Richard started playing a lot of my stuff when we were hav­ Quartet." ing rehearsal. I used to go over to his house at least twice a week, study­ Threadgill's parents split up when he was about three years old. Sud- ing. He didn't charge me. I guess he saw that I had something. Everybody denly, in a small dwelling, "We were up with my grandmother, grandfather, liked to be with Richard because he was so warm. my mother's brothers and sisters," said Threadgill. ''All of us lived together." The family moved to Englewood when Threadgill was in the fourth grade. Henry Threadgill remembers meeting Richard Abrams at an Experimen­ To make ends meet, his mother "did all kinds of things, making lamp­ tal Band rehearsal "somewhere in '63 or '64."54 Despite his being somewhat shades, accounting, working in banks." The now-defunct Maxwell Street younger than Mitchell and Jarman, the open atmosphere helped him to fit market area on Chicago's West Side was known to many as "Jewtown" be­ in. Threadgill was born in 1944 in Bronzeville, right at 33rd and Cottage cause of its historical demographics, even though during Threadgill's time, Grove. As with Leroy Jenkins, Threadgill's family migration story differs the area's immigrant Jewish population was largely vestigial. Like many markedly from the romantic standard exemplified by Louis Armstrong's black families, Threadgill's people visited the market on weekends to buy fabled trek: staples and clothing, and to hear Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and the other bluesmen who performed regularly on the market's outdoor stages. My grandfather, Henry, he brought my grandmother and my father up to Threadgill started playing piano at the age of four, taking lessons as fi­ Chicago. He drove liquor for the Mob, all the way to Canada. My father nances permitted. "My aunt was going to school to be an opera singer," would jump in the car with him all the time. He wouldn't go to school, he recalled. "That's how we got the piano in the first place. I learned how and my grandmother would be very upset. He kind of picked his stuff up . to play boogie-woogie. I would practice Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Am­ from the kind of life he got involved in from my grandfather, in a sense. mons. I kept that on the radio. I could figure out harmony because I could They would travel all over America with a couple of .45s on the seat, play the piano." In his early teens, Threadgill began playing saxophone and running liquor all the way to Canada from Alabama, Georgia. He made clarinet at Englewood High School, where he placed second in the citywide enough money that he brought the family to Chicago. championship on tenor, performing light-classical works. Even so, high­ school music was less attractive than the 63rd Street nightlife scene. "''ve "My father? My father was a gambler," Threadgill chuckled. been going in joints since I was fourteen," Threadgill told me in our inter­ view. "I used to live at McKie's. I saw everybody. All you would do is take When I was a kid, up to third grade, he ran gambling houses, because your horn. They would say, just sit over there, young blood, and don't you I remember him taking us there. He wasn't in numbers, the policy even think about no drink. They'd see you with your horn, and they would wheels. He did cards, craps. They had tables, the croupiers and stuff. say, just sit over there and get you a Coca-Cola or something." All kinds of people came to these gambling places, because he used to Threadgill began playing jam sessions on tenor around 1961, during what 74 Chapter Three The Development of the Experimental Band 75 turned out to be the 63rd Street area's final period of vitality. Threadgill admits that "I wasn't doing nothing major. I had to play the head, and then thing I couldn't touch. I didn't know what the hell was going on, . get out of the way" He garnered still more experience playing in polka and I didn't know why I liked it. I positioned myself and grabbed his hand bands, Dixieland ensembles, and rehearsal big bands. Doing parade gigs and told him how many pieces of his that I liked. He just looked at me for with the old-timers in Veterans of Foreign Wars bands, the young saxo­ a long time, very earnestly. You gotta remember that I knew that he,;as phonist performed critical functions for the musicians, who ranged upward the one who taught William Grant Still, so I knew that he was okay. of seventy-five years of age. With no chance to relieve themselves while on the march, "Cats had to wear bladders. We'd be on the bus. Everybody Muhal Richard Abrams recalls that "Roscoe brought Joseph around, and said, 'Hold it,' Cats would whip out their bladders and attach them to their both of them brought Henry later," but Threadgill remembers that he was johnsons. They'd say, 'Get over here, boy,' and then I'd tape it up under the at the Experimental Band slightly before the others. The ~usic students at bottom of the shoe." Wilson had a jazz interest club, and used some of the club s fundmg to en­ Threadgill came to Wilson Junior College in 1963, right after high school. gage Abrams to perform. Shortly thereafter, Mitchell, Jarman, and Thread­ One day, he came into Wilson's student cafeteria, and fellow student Milton gill all found themselves sitting in rehearsals of the Expenmental Band, Chapman pointed out "somebody you gotta meet." alongside Donald Myrick, Eddie Harris, and bass1st Loms Satterfield. But by early 1965, Threadgill had dropped out of both the Expe~imental B~nd I looked in this crowd of people and I saw this guy sitting by himself at a and Wilson Junior College. A call to spiritual arms was the pnmary mouva- . with the saxophone the weapon of choice. Threadgill began playmg table up against the wall with a black charcoal jacket, dark trousers, a pair ~. hi of old comfort shoes, and a bald head and a navy turtleneck sweater, with his tenor saxophone for the Lord, with all his heart and soul, but somet ng a brown briefcase on the floor. He didn't have much money, and he was was missing: "The minister told me he wanted me to come up and play 'His having just a roll, a bowl of soup, and a cup of tea. I said, that's the guy, Eye Is on the Sparrow,' I played it, and all them old sisters, what they called right? I knew that this was not a regular guy here. h ' illars of faith,' they just kind of sat back and some of them fell asleep. tep "Th When I finished, it was like a grunt. I knew I hadn't done nothing. e~, Threadgill remembers "the guy," Joseph Jarman, as "the first way-out the pastor made a suggestion regarding instrumentation that Threadgill guy I met" at Wilson. Under the tutelage of Richard Wang, Threadgill be­ hadn't considered before. "The minister said, Henry, I got a saxophone up came excited about his courses in harmony and analysis, and developed a under the pulpit. It's smaller than yours. I want you to take it to the shop study group with Mitchell and Jarman. "I used to turn in anywhere from and get it fixed. I'll pay for it. I reached up under there and It was an al~o." I five to fifteen versions of any harmony assignment," Threadgill recalled. took it to the repairman, and they fixed it up in a couple of days. The mmis­ 'You could ask Richard Wang. I would stay up all night, because you could ter said, I want you to play that same song on Sunday. It got house." see all these possibilities. We had these blackboards, and we'd be drinking As Threadgill discovered, in the church environment, 'The tenor saxo­ tea and taking NoDoz." At the study group sessions, Mitchell introduced phone don't translate. You can play the blues, but for those people, it doesn't " Threadgill and Jarman to the Art Blakey and Horace Silver charts that he work . A Church of God evangelist from Philadelphia, Horace Shepherd,h d had transcribed during his army days. happened to be at services that day. "I had known abo~t Horace Shep er , Threadgill also counts his attendance at concerts of the University of from the time I was five or six years old. He was called The Child Wonder, Chicago Contemporary Chamber Players, directed by composers Easley My grandmother and them used to go to the tents. Black people kept news- Blackwood and Ralph Shapey, among the important formative experiences paper c! 1ppmgs.. · " Alto saxophone in hand , Threadgill went. . to Philadelphia . that marked his early years. with Shepherd's evangelism troupe, which included musl~Ians and smgers. "I was playing in camp meetings, speaking in tongues, pullmg snakes out of I met Hindemith and Varese in person. With Hindemith I had just kind of people's mouths. Vernard Johnson was my only competition, and ~ could validated something that I had already learned, but the Varese was some- beat his ass. I bet he was glad I got out of there, because he couldn t com­ pete with me at that time [laughs]." 76 Chapter Three The Development of the Experimental Band 77

There was much to be learned from Shepherd's approach to what made people do things like that." Practicing a form of avoidance be­ evangelism-as-theater. As Threadgill observed, Shepherd's sermons "were havior, Jones began to spend much of his time indoors listening to records. compositions-they were structured." From his mother, he picked up a taste for Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, and Ben Webster. His father loved the It's all done in stages. I'd walk from the back of the tent [sings], Doooh­ big bands, and had a record player with "an astronomical sound." Joining a Oooooh- Weee, and by the time I got to the front, I better have them people mail-order record club, the first records Jones ever owned, "like a lot of cats on their feet. By the time I got right in front of the bandstand, the organ in my age group," were Dave Brubeck's "Take Five," and guitarist Johnny and the piano kicked in behind me [sings]. The people were like, Oww! Smith's classic version of "Moonlight in Vermont." Then the choir jumped up and they go to screamin'. Then the soloists Giving up on the vocational high-school education that he initially come out, and I'm playing behind them, free-that's right, just free. I'd be thought useful, Jones joined the army at seventeen, going first to Fort Leon­ gone by then, Aaaahhh! Wooo! Waaah! By the time we'd get the crowd to a ard Wood in Missouri for basic training, then to Fort Gordon, near Augusta, certain level, Shepherd would come out there and leap over the pulpit into Georgia. Jones was used to garden-variety Chicago racism, but his upbring­ the audience and do a split. The people would be hysterical by that time. ing had not prepared him for being physically removed from the USO build­ ing in Augusta: "You didn't know what Shepherd was gonna do," marveled Threadgill. "He was so crazy he might swing in on a rope." I mean, out in the street, in my nice green American uniform with my Leonard Jones came to the Experimental Band around 1964. Jones was little brass buttons and my little brass things on my cap. Soaking wet in born in Cook County Hospital in 1943. His mother, who was born in Chi­ the rain, they rut me out in the street-very politely, but I had to go. If I cago, and his father, who came to the city as a child from Alabama, grew didn't go politely, they would have made sure that I went some other way. up in the Chicago of the 1920s and 1930s. Jones saw his father, a Chicago I mean, I had never experienced anything like-this is already February policeman, only sporadically during his childhood. Jones's mother worked 1961. Civil rights stuff had been going on for years, but in the bus station various jobs as a waitress and cashier, and eventually became a dietary su­ in Augusta, Georgia, they had water fountains, white and colored, just pervisor. Jones's parents divorced when he was four, and he, his mother and like I had been reading about. two siblings moved into a severely subdivided West Side apartment at 14th and Ashland. Jones's grandparents occupied one room, and his uncle slept Jones's interest in music performance began in earnest when he was in the living room on a foldaway bed. The room occupied by Jones and shipped off to Bad Kreuznach in Germany, one of many bases maintained his family was directly above the stage at Harry and Vi's, a local blues bar by American forces facing the Warsaw Pact. Jones was surprised to find that that competed with the famous Zanzibar, just a block away. Literally living American-style racism had already been imported into Germany: with the blues, Jones heard "all the blues cats, you name 'em. I mean every­ body played in Harry and Vi's Lounge, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Otis Everything was just like it was in America-segregated. There were black Spann, Willie Dixon, and a lot of people I just don't remember. You always bars, because you didn't go into the bars where the white cats were be­ went to bed late because you couldn't get no sleep. The music was always cause there were always fights .... About two or three seconds after you coming upstairs." 56 got in the door, somebody'd be saying, "There's some niggers in here!" When Jones was thirteen, his family moved into one of the most notori­ The stories the white soldiers would tell about you! They used to tell all ous Chicago housing projects, the Stateway Gardens at 35th and State on the little German kids that we had tails that came out at midnight. the South Side. "We moved into a building that was brand spanking new, but it didn't stay that way long," said Jones. 'At first it wasn't too bad, the Listening to the Eighth Division Army Band, Jones was fascinated by youth were just breaking out the light bulbs. At first they were fixing things "this thumping sound that old cats got, this basic, walking bass," and began real quick. Then they were defecating and peeing in the halls. I don't know to dream of playing the bass himself. Under the influence of a bass-playing 76 Chapter Three

There was much to be learned from Shepherd's approach to evangelism-as-theater. As Threadgill observed, Shepherd's sermons "were compositions- they were structured."

It's all done in stages. I'd walk from the back of the tent [sings], Doooh­ Oooooh-Weee, and by the time I got to the front, I better have them people on their feet. By the time I got right in front of the bandstand, the organ and the piano kicked in behind me [sings]. The people were like, Oww! Then the choir jumped up and they go to screamin'. Then the soloists come out, and I'm playing behind them, free- that's right, just free. I'd be gone by then, Aaaahhh! Wooo! Waaah! By the time we'd get the crowd to a certain level, Shepherd would come out there and leap over the pulpit into the audience and do a split. The people would be hysterical by that time.

"You didn't know what Shepherd was gonna do," marveled Threadgill. "He was so crazy he might swing in on a rope."